When You Don’t Feel Anything During Depression

Everyone has been dealing with depression or depression at some point in life. We have suffered it either ourselves or our loved ones are.

Depression is experienced in different ways, depending on the person. Others experience a mixture of grief and anger combined with depression. Others feel emptiness and a complete lack of emotion. Depression is like your body leading you and your mind being hazy. During depression, it feels as if reality is blurry and we are ice-cold, in the midst of complete emptiness.

Phillip Lopate, a well-known North American essayist and author, described this feeling in his overflowing poem called Numbness . This poem seeks to draw this feeling – the experience of a complete emotional vacuum. In his poem, Lopate describes depression as a walk through an icy field. Depression makes us completely indifferent and freezes the heart. Lopate leaves us with a vision of an anorexic illusion in which we are excluded from the rest of the world.

We need to understand that there are few diseases that are as complex and ambiguous as depression. Some people with this disease show obvious symptoms, while others carry invisible symptoms for months or even years. It affects sleep, concentration, memory, movements and even our way of speaking.

We don’t often talk about clinical depression. We don’t always talk about the patient feeling absolutely nothing. Instead of emotions, the patient feels a wall that has completely isolated him from the rest of the world and even from himself.

What should you do when you feel nothing during depression?

One reason you don’t feel anything during depression is that you’ve been dealing with a situation in the past that was so mentally powerful that you didn’t know how to act. The clinical literature calls this a “mental hangover”. A mental hangover arises when something takes complete control of our emotions. In addition, after depression, we may develop other illnesses, such as anxiety disorders or unresolved traumas.

When we talk about depression, we need to mention one preconception that many people have about it. People constantly associate this disease with grief. However, many patients deal with layers of emotion. Depression is not just sadness. It includes pessimism, anger and depression. It gives us a sense of instability and mental neutrality that can cause us physical symptoms such as migraines, muscle pain and digestive problems.

Patients who fit this profile may also suffer from excessive sleep, sleeping for 10-15 hours a day. They also claim to be unable to smile or cry. Just as their bodies and minds not only forget how these actions are performed, but also completely forget the meaning of these emotional gestures. Next, we talk about these overwhelming symptoms and their explanations.

Suppressed emotions

Many of us have been taught since childhood to hide or cover up feelings that hurt, disturb, or worry us. That’s one reason why you may not feel anything during depression. It is very common when it comes to a complex family situation or a stressful work environment.

Such situations create a feeling of great anxiety that can become chronic until the person suffering from it sinks into depression. We can get used to this feeling for months or years without even realizing it. We forget how to outsource our worries, fears, or remorse, and our brains gradually begin to become numb. A similar phenomenon gives birth to a classical mental haze in which we react slowly to our environment and our ability to pay decreases along with concentration and memory.

The trauma of the past

If we read Phillip Lopate’s poem, to which we referred earlier and which describes the intensity of his depression, we will find something very revealing. In this poem, Lopate talks about how his father called him a “cold fish” since he was 9 years old. Lopate begins to misrepresent himself due to his father’s criticism. Lopat’s father mocked him for his shy behavior and appearance and Lopate began to see himself in a negative way.

We often find in patients with depression how severe the past or unresolved trauma can cause this illness filled with mental indifference.

What therapeutic methods should be used in these situations?

Our brains are an awesome body. Not only are the brains very sophisticated, they are also complex, as they are responsible for ensuring the evolution of evolution. Because of this complexity, it is so challenging to solve brain-related problems such as depression.

We must first understand that no matter how many times others repeat the brain to be like a computer, it is not true. We are not machines.  In fact, emotions dominate the brain. Understanding those processes, learning to deal with them, and getting our benefits to work are the only ways to get out of the prison built by depression.

Psychologists recommend starting sentences with the words “I feel” when we don’t feel anything during depression. It is necessary to reveal the many layers of our emotions so that we can get to the heart of our problems. We need to figure out the traumas of the past that haunt us so we can heal and move on. Cognitive behavioral therapy can help us with that.

The moment we begin to let go of our anger, fears, and worries, we begin to build a path to healing.